Ideological Indoctrination
Weather and rainfall, as well as snowfall, in Arizona, are largely controlled by elevation. Phoenix, at just under 1,100 feet Above Sea Level (ASL) for example had .3 inches of snow at the airport back in 1937 with rarely a flake since then. In Tucson, even though it is farther south, at an elevation of 2,340 feet ASL, snow is not such a rarity. Flagstaff, on the other hand, at 6,821 feet ASL has plenty of snow every year. The nearby San Francisco Peaks offer downhill skiing into late May.
The Chiricahua Mountains located in southeastern Arizona, 95 miles east-south-east of Tucson has an average elevation of 6,000 feet with the highest peak sitting at 9,759 feet ASL. In these mountains, a new species of tarantula spider has been discovered and recently named the “Aphonopelma jacobii” spider.
The research study that describes the detection of the new species and published in ZooKeys is linked here. In that study climate change is only mentioned in the statement, “Some important threats facing the Chiricahua Mountains and these tarantulas include exurban development in the San Simon Valley and Portal area, destructive recreational activities (e.g., offroad vehicles, degradation of undeveloped campsites), fire (natural and human-caused) due to fuel accumulation and fire suppression, invasive species, and climate change (i.e., increasing temperatures and decreasing precipitation amounts and patterns)”.
The date of the research article is August 16, 2024. However, just 3 days later a news article arrives and is headlined, “Will climate change lead to the extinction of a newly discovered tarantula species?” The linked article was published by Science X who is wholly owned by Omicron and presented under the URL “phys.org”. It was published in several other outlets as well.
The news story states, “The forests where these tarantulas live are threatened by several factors, perhaps most notably from climate change.” Conversely, in the research study, that introduces the tarantula for the first time, the threat of climate change is mentioned last. Several hazards were addressed before it.
Further, if all of these spiders lived below the 1.85-mile mark in elevation (9759 feet), which one would certainly expect, there would be a lot of room to move to cooler locales should temperatures dictate. All of the climate change luminaries fail to mention that fact.
I was first drawn to the story on the KXPI late local news in Idaho Falls, Idaho. Their explicit angle on the story surrounded the threat to the spider from climate change. None of the other concerns were mentioned.
This clearly points out how the liberal news takes events of weather, and without evidence, except supportive dialogue from the advocacy community, and makes it all about anthropogenic climate change. It is all about ideological indoctrination.